The Bookstore Siege

Imagine reading in a Bookstore somehow unleashes monsters.

In the heart of Willow Book, Pages & Tomes was more than a bookstore—it was a haven for dreamers. Its creaky wooden floors and towering shelves brimmed with stories, tended by a tight-knit crew: Lopez, the quick-witted manager; Jeff, the lanky bookworm with an encyclopedic memory; Em, the artist who curated the store’s quirky displays; and Ryan, the charming cashier with a knack for calming any storm.


One rainy evening, as the store’s amber lights flickered, a strange book appeared on the counter. Bound in cracked leather, its title shimmered: Tales of the Unbound. No one recalled stocking it. Curious, Jeff cracked it open and read aloud, “From shadows deep, the beasts arise…”


The air thickened. A guttural roar echoed from the stacks. The crew froze as a hulking, ink-black creature with glowing eyes slithered from the fiction aisle, its claws scraping the floor. Lopez grabbed a broom. “What the hell did you do, Jeff?”


“I just read it!” Jeff stammered, slamming the book shut. Another roar—more creatures emerged, each born from a different genre. A skeletal knight clattered from history, a swarm of buzzing sprites from fantasy, a slimy thing with too many mouths from sci-fi.


“Spread out!” Lopez barked. She swung the broom, knocking the knight’s skull clean off. It stumbled but kept coming. Em, thinking fast, grabbed a ladder and toppled a shelf of romance novels onto the sprites, crushing half the swarm in a flurry of pink covers. Ryan, ever cool-headed, snatched a fire extinguisher and blasted the slimy sci-fi beast, pinning it to the wall in a cloud of foam.


Jeff clutched Tales of the Unbound, flipping pages frantically. “It says reading them summons them—but finishing the story banishes them!”


“Then read, nerd!” Em shouted, dodging a sprite’s tiny, venomous darts. She hurled a coffee mug, shattering it against the knight’s ribs.


Jeff perched on the counter, voice shaking but steady, reading the tale of each monster. As he described the knight’s defeat, its bones collapsed into dust. The crew fought to buy him time. Lopez and Ryan tag-teamed the ink-black beast, luring it into the narrow biography aisle where Lopez toppled a display of presidential memoirs, trapping it. Em sketched runes from a mythology book on the floor, slowing the sprites’ advance.


One by one, Jeff’s words undid the horrors. The sci-fi blob dissolved into goo as he finished its chapter. The sprites vanished in a puff of glitter. Finally, only the ink-beast remained, thrashing under the bookshelf. Jeff’s voice cracked as he reached its final line: “And with dawn’s light, the shadow was no more.”


The beast howled, then melted into a puddle of ink, seeping into the floorboards. Silence fell, broken only by the patter of rain outside.


Panting, Lopez glared at Jeff. “No more mystery books without my say-so.”


Em laughed, wiping ink from her hands. “Think we earned a coffee break?”


Ryan grinned, already tidying the chaos. “Only if we burn that book first.”


They didn’t burn it. Instead, Lopez locked Tales of the Unbound in the safe, its pages untouched. The crew returned to their routine, restocking shelves, joking over coffee. But late at night, when the store was quiet, they’d glance at the safe, wondering what other stories it held—and whether they’d be ready to fight them.